Friend has an old laptop with windows 10 that he doesn’t use because too slow and freezing all the time. Wants to revive it to leave at his lab in grad school for browsing the internet and editing stuff on google docs so he doesn’t have to carry his newer laptop everyday.
I suggested Linux but I myself always used Debian and I am not sure it will run decently with such low specs. Was thinking maybe Debian 11 with xfce or something? Any better options?
Not exactly, when Crunhbang development ceased Crunchbang++ aka #!++came out and that distro is currently maintained. As far as I can tell #!++ is more of the same, which is a good thing. I had to retire my tired old eee pcs a long while back, so the NUC I replaced it with was fine with standard Debian since it had 16x the ram.